Over the past five years of Syria’s civil war, the United States has admitted a grand total of 53 Syrian Christian refugees, a lone Yazidi, and fewer than ten Druze, Bahá’ís, and Zoroastrians combined. That so few of the Syrian refugees coming here are non-Muslim minorities is due to American reliance on a United Nations refugee-resettlement program that disproportionately excludes them. Past absolute totals of Syrian refugees to the U.S. under this program were small, but as the Obama administration now ramps up refugee quotas by tens of thousands, it would be unconscionable to continue with a process that has consistently forsaken some of the most defenseless and egregiously persecuted of those fleeing Syria. The gross underrepresentation of the non-Muslim communities in the numbers of Syrian refugees into the U.S. is reflected year after year in the State Department’s public records. They show, for example, that while Syria’s largest non-Muslim group — Christians of the various Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions — constituted 10 percent of Syria’s population before the war, they are only 2.6 percent of the 2,003 Syrian refugees that the United States has accepted since then. Syria’s Christian population, which before the war numbered 2 million, has since 2011 been decimated in what Pope Francis described as religious “genocide.” Tens of thousands of Aleppo’s 160,000 Christians alone have fled, many to Lebanon, after 1,000 of their community, including two Orthodox bishops, were abducted and murdered, according to Melkite Catholic archbishop Jean-Clement Jeanbart.

The aristocracy of the Muslim world doesn’t not want confrontation. It’s obvious.

The elite, the educated, the *landed*, those with something to lose, those who find the best aspects of Islamic history in science, commerce, scholarship — they recognizing the absurdity of the open confrontation with the West being promoted by their own underclasses. All the West has to do is lose patience.

But the elites seem powerless to stop the pull of these mal-incentives. Islam as an ideology is too appealing to the underclasses. (Anyone gets redemption by becoming an enforcer of Islam — the stricter the interpretation, the nobler the violence.)

So there’s a fundamental incentive problem. It appeals to the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

Here’s a theory of recent history to test: the brain drain of Islamic aristocracy from the Middle East into the West left the inmates running the asylum. The best of Islamic society was not present to suppress stupid interpretations of their beliefs, and now they’ve coalesced from a religion to an ideology to a movement.

(An interesting aside: Early incarnations of Islam strictly reserved for the upper classes, and considered it absurd to share the revelations with the underclasses. In the words of Haille Mariam-Lemar​:

—-“ISIL/ISIS/IS are actually theoreticians of democracy. Within islamic theology they belong to a historical tradition called khajirites. The khajirites combined radical democracy with literalism. This is why the middle eastern tyrannies are so frightened of them. As anyone familiar with islamic history would tell you the early islamic caliphates viewed islam as a property of the arab aristocracy and opposed mass conversion. The aristocrats were opposed by the khajirites who argued that any man, even a black slave, can become a caliph so long as he has the requisite theological training and is elected.”—-)

The appeal to the underclasses, and specifically, the licensing of bad behavior among the underclasses gives Islam an irreparable incentive problem.

Communism is similarly broken (for this and MANY other reasons). The worst people have license to use excuse their personal failures and use violence against imagined enemies.

A third instance of this theme: It seems a similar incentive problem exists in the victim narrative adopted by parts of the black community in the US. Look at how Richard Sherman’s very gentle self-reflection of violence in his community is perceived as utter betrayal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDIlx7oP_d8

Look for what ideologies do to underclasses — to people who are not that good at life, and tend to cling to just a few actionable ideas in their heads as if they were liferafts — because in the confusing, dangerous worlds they perceive, boiled-down ideologies ARE liferafts.

Here is a brief summary of the general understanding of what neocons believe:

1 They agree with Trotsky on permanent revolution, violent as well as intellectual.
2 They are for redrawing the map of the Middle East and are willing to use force to do so.
3 They believe in preemptive war to achieve desired ends.
4 They accept the notion that the ends justify the means – that hard-ball politics is a moral necessity.
5 They express no opposition to the welfare state.
6 They are not bashful about an American empire; instead they strongly endorse it.
7 They believe lying is necessary for the state to survive.
8 They believe a powerful federal government is a benefit.
9 They believe pertinent facts about how a society should be run should be held by the elite and withheld from those who do not have the courage to deal with it.
10 They believe neutrality in foreign affairs is ill-advised.
11 They hold Leo Strauss in high esteem.
12 They believe imperialism, if progressive in nature, is appropriate.
13 Using American might to force American ideals on others is acceptable. Force should not be limited to the defense of our country.
14 9-11 resulted from the lack of foreign entanglements, not from too many.
15 They dislike and despise libertarians (therefore, the same applies to all strict constitutionalists).
16 They endorse attacks on civil liberties, such as those found in the Patriot Act, as being necessary.
17 They unconditionally support Israel and have a close alliance with the Likud Party.